Just out of interest, what is the difference in your opinion between a 1950s mindset and a present day one? In relation to mental health, if you must, but broaden it out if you want.

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Tdf

I wanted to draw you out on the ‘1950s mindset’. All you had given me were statistics about prison numbers, which I do not believe, and an assertion that things improved with ‘modernization’. Short posts can be succinct expressions of deep knowledge or the unreflective parroting of cliche. If you ask someone to expand upon a cliche they can only waffle as by definition it cannot be done. Also, given your advice to broaden my knowledge by reading Will Self, I was half hoping you might come up with more of the same.

The questions are logically connected, at least in my own mind. At university I found Weber’s thesis interesting but unconvincing: there was some correlation but where was the causality? To put Irish ‘backwardness’ down to Catholicism is the back of the same coin. The cliched view of Irish history states that the hopes of independence were stifled by an oppressive church (acting in plain sight), and saying the rosary apparently stunts economic growth. An alternative view, suggested by Crotty, has it the other way round. By the outbreak of WW1 the competition between the owners of land (the Anglo landlords) and the native owners of the capital in the form of stock (say 20,000 ‘strong famers’, whose parents or grandparents, rack rented themselves, had got lucky) had already been settled with the latter replacing the former (from memory about 10,000 in number). Native industry had been destroyed by competition with English factories. . The landless ‘coolie’ class (alarming to owners of property, especially after the French Revolution) had long been eradicated in the Famine or had emigrated to America, resulting in a hugely middle class country composed of landowners large and (admittedly often very) small, a professional and clerical class and a very small proletariat compared to Britain. The reservation of the Lord Lieutenant’s role and one or two other high offices to Protestants was no more than an irritant, as was the disproportionate influence of Anglo Protestants in the professions. The outbreak of war was a boon to farmers as prices rose (my own father told me that a quarter of a century later he was driving a pig to market with his own father when they heard the news that war was imminent or had already been declared – my grandfather brought the animal home again and waited for the price to rise). The catalyst was the proposal to introduce conscription after 1916, the last source of healthy young men yet untapped: this was something worthy of an insurrection. (Your reference to ‘shirking’ WW2 is foolish.)

In addition Ireland had just moved from being a net recipient from the British Treasury to a net contributor. The Liberals had recently introduced the embryonic welfare state and Irish farmers, who had never been so prosperous, were alarmed at having to subsidize it. The first act of the new independent state, dominated by wealthy farmers and their class allies in the professions, was to cut a shilling off the pension.

To continue Crotty’s analysis Ireland was a capitalist-colonized nation, the longest and most thorough of them all (dating from the Elizabethan conquest, the next longest was, I think, Barbados). Religion played the role that skin colour did elsewhere in distinguishing the colonizers from the colonized. The Church (he argued) was one of four institutions who flourished on the rotting carcass of Ireland’s society and economy, though he did not deny the scale of its good work. The others, from memory, include Guinness’s Brewery and the banks (disproportionately wealthy and profitable compared to elsewhere, through investing Irish agricultural profits in British industry). His central point is that such colonies ‘undevelop’ rather than develop. This explains Ireland’s continued underperformance. (I should mention that he sees the state as a parasite in post capitalist colonies, doing more harm than good – he was writing forty years ago so missed the extension of this to the state everywhere, by the look of it.) By the way it is a scandal that so little attention has been given to his work, which was nothing less than an original (and convincing) explanation of the development of civilization, and of capitalism in particular (which should be seen as primarily an agricultural phenomenon).

As for the ‘Protestant Ethic’ driving capitalism (and the Catholic one hindering), it just is not true. Capitalism developed in the forests of central western Europe when pastoralists from the east had filtered into the region, and to Britain and Ireland. By a unique set of circumstances, with harsh cold winters unsuitable for tillage, they were forced to grow crops to provide winter fodder to keep their precious stock alive. It was a harsh and primitive life with meagre returns on seed corn and for the first time men were faced with the choice of saving (and choosing what to save) and consumption. Land was limitless (it had to be cleared) but survival was impossible without capital: livestock (for ploughing), seed, buildings and tools. The relationship with the warrior class was symbiotic – too harsh and they would disappear into the forests taking their capital with them. This discovery of capital was unique in the world and, although the start was painfully slow (northern Europe only overtook the south at the turn of the first millenium) output was potentially infinite, a startling phenomenon which only became really obvious in the 16thC. The institutions of rights under law and of property were fundamental. Religion had little to do with it. Henry’s break with Rome was to secure the absolute title of the new landlords (formerly feudal lords) to their lands, which with the wool trade provided (unique in Europe, again because of England’s geographic situation, midway between W. European capitalism and Irish pastoralism) to profit from land. Ireland was conquered (at great expense – the proceeds of the monastic confiscations – and with much difficulty) for land and for strategic reasons. The tragedy for Ireland was that, alone in Europe, it was pastoral. Rain and mild winters make crop growing extremely difficult. This is what happened to the original Norman conquerors, capitalist crop-growers: they became ‘more Irish than the Irish’ (ipsis hiberniis hiberniores). They became fully pastoralist and adopted Irish customs. Pastoral societies don’t have private property. The imposition of English institutions, in particular private property in land, is at the heart of Ireland’s disability. Alien institutions were imposed on a non-capitalist people (unique in Europe) without any regard to their welfare.

The cliched view of Irish history points at the evils perpetrated by a repressive, authoritarian, abusive church (I haven’t the time or energy for all the inverted commas). Then the modernizers arrived and (having read his book, or more probably read reviews in the foreign press) waved Keynes’s magic wand and dispelled the darkness. Now we live in compassionate world, where you can be ‘spiritual’ without going to church, and the authorities are detecting more paedophiles than you would ever believe. The British version is similar but without the church and revolving around the exhilarating liberations achieved since the Fab 60s, ’embracing change’. And Hitler. I haven’t time to go into the fantasy side of this, according to Booker (and myself) possibly the most important.

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